Limerick brothers raise $70m as Stripe’s value soars

STRIPE, the internet payments company founded by Limerick brothers John and Patrick Collison, has doubled its value to $3.5bn after its latest round of fundraising.

STRIPE, the internet payments company founded by Limerick brothers John and Patrick Collison, has doubled its value to $3.5bn after its latest round of fundraising.

The company, which numbers Apple, Facebook and Twitter among its clients, raised $70m - about €57m - from investors, valuing the company somewhere north of €2.8bn.

The latest funding round follows $80m worth of fundraising in January, that had valued the company - founded in 2010 and based in San Francisco - at close to $2bn.

The company has blazed a trail in the complex world of internet payments, providing online retailers with technology that allows -in-app’ purchasing, making it extremely valuable to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Patrick Collison said Stripe’s goal was to “improve the complex infrastructure for online payments”.

“There’s commerce that could be happening and isn’t happening today,” he told the Financial Times.

Mr Collison indicated that Stripe was “still sitting” on much of what it raised in January and was recruiting investment to offset any potential dip in international markets.

Investors in the company include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who said at Dublin’s Web Summit recently that Stripe has “enormous traction” in the online payment processing industry.

“There is always a sense that internet payments as a category is still going to grow tremendously in the years ahead,” said the tech giant.

“Stripe has gotten a monopoly-like position in getting access to the developers, they have gotten enormous traction with the developers that build these new websites. As many new websites gets built, I think Stripe will have a big advantage in getting embedded in those in the years and decades ahead.”

Stripe most recently struck up a deal with Twitter to offer in-app selling to users, a major deal for the company that has 175 employees at its base in San Francisco.

Speaking at the Dublin event, John Collison said that future e-commerce will take place within platforms like Twitter and Facebook and that companies will look to do much of their selling through those online mediums.

“More people will do this if you make it easier,” said the Limerick man.

“Given that people are spending so much time on (social network) platforms, it’s natural to make it easy for merchants to sell.”

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